!($elegant)

I went to perlmonks and posted a design question - essentially, "How on God's green earth am I going to build a table out of an array entry in the middle of a print statement, if that's possible, which I don't think it is?" - and I've come to a conclusion after reading the responses:

"It would be easier to just build it yourself."

Ah, the joy of epiphany.

I realize it's not the best solution. I realize it's not even the right solution. But at this point, I can mark it, come back to it later, and do something that will generate exactly the same HTML. So there's really no reason to agonize over it; just one print statement that starts the table, a print statement inside a for loop, and one print statement to end the table - and make the goddamn table already.

Hopefully I'll get to kludge this together tomorrow, and at least have something to kick around in CGI a bit. I have to get up at 8:00 to drive to a garage where a friend of my brother's works, then have to drive back.

Except for the faint but distinct possibility that I'll forget where I'm going and drive to the north end of the state, it's all peachy.

I realize this isn't Perl...but it just came back to me, and I'd like to note it before it slips away. Besides, I'm told my ramblings are occasionally entertaining.

I have deranged notions all the time built around acronyms. (Is that the first sign of Manager Syndrome?) But my train of thought went...

"Well, what about a little intelligent agent that somehow followed you wherever you went - if you took a walk, it would be there on your PDA, already ready with content for you. When you got home, it would already know what it had shown you, gotten rid of it, show you new stuff, etc. etc., and could be set up to follow you around through a presence it had on a centralized web server."

"What would you call it?"

"I like the name DOG, but I have no idea what it would stand for."

"Hm. Data...Data Organization..."

I was stuck for a few minutes before it hit me.

"Data Organizer and Gatherer. DOG. Your dog has a unique name - the userid for it - and a unique password. You log into the web server, give your DOG's name and password, and your dog shows you what it's retrieved. It would be a web-bot that would act like you and look for things you want to look at even when you're not online."

"If it got really good at fetching (come on, I'd have to call it fetching) then it would be like you were collecting things to look at yourself - eventually the thing would mirror your web habits."

I know. It's not feasible. I realize that; but on the other hand, if I ever get around to writing my novels, there's no reason it couldn't exist in five or ten years.

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